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RANJAY GULATI: The 3rd T is for teamwork.
Pretty much every single coach I talked
to talked about team culture.
How do you create this team culture
that, in turn, plays a huge role in how well you can perform
as a team, as a collective?
And a lot of it has to do with the tone the coach sets,
setting expectations, creating clearly defined
criteria of what is acceptable and not acceptable.
So if you look at Nick Saban and Alabama,
it's very clearly defined expectations
of performance and behavior at practice, in the game,
and outside.
So sometimes punishing players is as much
of a signal and affirmation of the culture
as rewarding players.
Another lever people use is the slogan for the team.
Here in New England, Bill Belichick's team slogan
is do your job.
Do your job, meaning I'm holding you responsible.
If you do your job, everybody else is doing their job.
But it also means stay in your lane and only do your job,
not anybody else's job.
And by the way, if you don't do your job, you're out.
So there are many ways to interpret that.
And some may say positive, some may not like it.
And there's a self-selection that happens there.
Contrast that with Pete Carroll.
So Pete Carroll, the Seattle Seahawks coach, their team
slogan is I'm in.
And that has different connotations.
It connotes a team.
It connotes commitment.
It connotes personal connection.
It is going to elicit a different kind of reaction.
It's also going to attract a different kind of person.
Who wants to work in a "do your job?"
Who wants to work in an "I'm in?"
You have to ask yourself, what kind of organization
do I want to lead?
One of the other elements of culture
is to create this kind of egalitarian mindset
that we are all in this team, and no one is special.
So if you look at Nick Saban, he has
a saying about structured accountability.
Everyone has the same rules applied to them equally.
No one is guaranteed playtime.
No matter who you are, no matter how special you think you are,
you're not guaranteed playtime.
You got to earn the right to play every game.
Some of the challenges these coaches
face when they have star players.
Sir Alex Ferguson with David Beckham.
In some cases, like Sir Alex Ferguson, he let Beckham go.
He said, you know what, you may be
the best player in the world, but I
don't want you on my team.
Or you have Phil Jackson working with Kobe saying,
if you really want to be the leader of this team, which
I think you do, you got to change the way you show up.
So how do these coaches recognize
that star talent may at some time, at some moment
get too big for themselves?
And how do you keep everybody in check and measured?
That's part of the culture.
If you look at some surveys of business leaders, close to 90%
say culture is critical to the success of our business.
And then asked to what degree is your culture where
it should be, 16% say it's where it should be.
It's one of those things that we systematically
talk about, say it's important, and then go on to neglect it.
Culture is also a magnet for talent,
the self-selection that happens when
you have a kind of culture.
If you want to be a high-performance organization
attracting high-performance talent,
you need a culture that draws them to want to come there.
And there's data showing that more than 80%
of talented people choose to join a company for the culture
and leave companies for the culture.
There's now research showing that how people perform at work
depends on how connected they feel to what they're doing.
If my work is a job, the maximum I'm going to get out of it
is being satisfied in my job.
It's called job satisfaction.
That leads to a certain level of productivity.
If I'm engaged, engaged comes when
you feel you have responsibility, autonomy.
That leads to a higher level of productivity.
You can go to the next level called inspired.
And in an article that came out in Harvard Business
Review in 2015, they showed inspired workers
are more than twice as productive as satisfied
workers.
We have to ask ourselves, is there
something we can do to put our culture to work in a way
that elicits inspired work?
And if you look at some of these teams,
you can start by saying some players do it
for themselves because if I play well, my record gets better.
I'm more marketable.
I can make more money.
Some will say I do it for the team.
I feel responsible and committed to the team.
I really want to do it for the team.
And others say I do it because this is a calling to me.
I do it for my coach.
I do it for glory.
I do it for something bigger than myself.
What, as a coach or a leader, are you tapping into?
I think some of the greatest coaches
are able to go from job to engaged to inspired.
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